October 19, 2008

The NYT article on Clinton Housing and Urban Development secretary Henry Cisneros's role in debauching mortgage credit standards in the name of helping lower income people get their hands on the American Dream raises a question that I've wondering about for awhile. I suspect that when the dust settles and we finally realize what an outsized role Hispanics had in mortgage defaults that set off the global credit crisis, we'll begin to realize that one reason the insanity of the Bubble years stayed somewhat under the national radar was that some of the very worst aspects of it were being conducted in Spanish. For example, Spanish language radio stations are hurting financially right now because they had been getting so much advertising from mortgage brokers and real estate agents. (When you read about some poor illegal immigrant maid taking out a $400,000 loan that she didn't understand from a predatory lender, read carefully and you'll note that the "predatory lender" who talked her into was almost always a Spanish-speaker himself.)

And there were a lot of English-speaking working-class Hispanics who got in on the bubble, too, but they are almost equally invisible to the NY-DC axis of power and influence in this country.

14 comments:

Veracitor
said...

I realize it's a bit off your main line of thinking right now, but note that the average IQ of Spanish-speakers in this country is not so high, and we already know that IQ is correlated with, what did Seattle School District call it? "future time orientation."

It is likely that a large fraction of the people who signed fraudulent mortgage applications to get into grossly overpriced houses truly did not understand what they were doing, and didn't much care, either.

Why should they care? The White man will pay for the clean up, the White man will pay for him to have children, the White man will be blamed for it eventually anyway (even if just for letting it happen) and the White man is racist for thinking or saying or (God Forbid) doing anything about it. A win-win all around.

The Salvadoran maid wasn't going to be doing any business with someone who *didn't* speak Spanish, since she probably speaks about ten words of English. And yeah, a barely-literate Salvadoran (Mexican, Guatemalan, etc.) woman who comes here to work as a maid is liable to be pretty easy to take advantage of with complicated legal documents and big financial transactions.

I'm guessing that both the "don't understand" and "don't care" issues came into play. If you're hoping to go back once you make enough money, how big a deal is it to you to have ruined your credit in the US? On the other hand, I know plenty of folks with high IQs and advanced degrees who got burned buying at the very peak of the housing market or taking on a mortgage they couldn't afford (because everyone else was doing it and everyone knew housing prices could never go down). When the smart, educated people doing business in their native legal environment and language f--k up, I'm inclined to cut illiterate peasants doing business in a foreign country and language quite a bit of slack.

For what it's worth, local Spanish stations are still advertising almost 100% financing mortgages and refinincing and such. I don't know whether the loans ever materialize, or this is some scam to get the last few dollars of Maria's money before she also loses the house.

I think a good case can be made that mestizo Mexicans as a culture are by nature the most portable, least rooted people in the western hemisphere. Who would be more so? After doing nothing but shrug as their own country wallows in unlivable chaos, they easily bail out on it to avail themselves of the order and prosperity that Anglo American culture built here. Once on this side of the border they think nothing of pulling the kids out of the classroom (assuming they are there to begin with) in the middle of a school term, tying the mattresses to the top of the car, and bolting town for some other state where a cousin has assured them that menial minimum wage employment is aplenty and housing codes and truancy laws aren't enforced.Is it any wonder that these same people feel little in the way of inhibition about defaulting on a mortgage (laws, contracts, regulations, - the entire notion of the social compact put in *writing* - are alien European concepts to the Indo-Mexican mentality, never particularly understood nor respected) and then loading up the mini-van and moving on without giving it a second thought?

I worked tech support for a national credit reporting agency for 18 months, quitting just this August.

Our customers were (supposedly) mortgage professionals -- loan originators, brokers, etc. A tiny but non-zero number of our callers DID NOT SPEAK ENGLISH. Any number greater than zero here is ridiculous, and the equivalent of a bank teller who doesn't speak English. A much larger number of our callers had terrible just-got-off-the-boat accents (asian and hispanic). Again, people who wouldn't be bank tellers -- unless their customers didn't speak English either. Obviously, most of those calls came from the west coast.

Steve forgot to call on you for help in authenticating this speculation. Someone out there, alas not me, has a handle on the Spanish language statistics relevant to the mortgage crisis. Send Steve the references. Send Steve the facts.

This dovetails with the article you published, which showed housing speculation was often small scale and peaked in working class and poorer neighborhoods. This makes some sense; a sheetrocker might figure: crap, I can flip these houses too and save $$ on the labor in doing so.

Never forget to mention one of the last White urban enclaves and its' blindness. I know they have had race troubles in the past, but they aren't on the Mexican border and they therefore get to lag at least a decade behind the rest of us.

"And that's not power? Nothing has been as instrumental in spreading the evil-white-men meme among the masses."

It's a different part of the power structure. What happens in LA doesn't matter much to people in government, the news media or finance. That's one of Steve's points: the Mexicanization of America is something that most of America's elites have no experience with.

Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.

You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.

Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).

Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here'show to do it.

(Non-tax deductible.)

Fourth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.)

Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)

My Book:

"Steve Sailer gives us the real Barack Obama, who turns out to be very, very different - and much more interesting - than the bland healer/uniter image stitched together out of whole cloth this past six years by Obama's packager, David Axelrod. Making heavy use of Obama's own writings, which he admires for their literary artistry, Sailer gives the deepest insights I have yet seen into Obama's lifelong obsession with 'race and inheritance,' and rounds off his brilliant character portrait with speculations on how Obama's personality might play out in the Presidency." - John Derbyshire Author, "Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics" Click on the image above to buy my book, a reader's guide to the new President's autobiography.